Among the wrongs which the current theatre is said to sustain to its detriment, homosexuality is included with an increasing alarm, if not in print so much, then in conversation. If one believes what one hears, then homosexuality inflicts no mere indisposition on the general theatrical enterprise, but rather a grave disability. Homosexuals—the indictment goes—have exploited the theatre's traditionally liberal hospitality toward deviant and errant souls and have become numerous, widespread, and powerful; they discriminate in favor of their own kind, invariably betraying artistic considerations for sexual and social advantages. But most lamentable—the indictment continues—is the fact that even when the homosexual resolves to renounce immediate personal gratifications in the service of theatre itself, his good intentions (unlike yours and mine) go awry; for there is something in the nature of homosexuality itself, some vague though actual corruption of spirit and vision, which imposes certain inevitable limitations on the expressiveness of the homosexual performer, writer, director, or whatever.

At least as far back as Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals(1872) scientists have studied analogic (as distinct from digital) modes of communication. Clearly all artists other than writers are technicians of the analogic.

Mary Overlie's demeanor is quiet and thoughtful. She speaks calmly, her words carefully chosen, analyzing ideas. The brown hair is always pulled back from the face, the face is always free of makeup; the body is long and lean, the ideal dancer's body, and her gestures tend to be spare. If the impression she gives is of almost shy reserve, it reflects only part of the personality.

Born in Bozeman, Montana in 1946, Overlie stayed there until she was 17. For a short time following her graduation from high school, she tried to be a sign painter but “couldn't focus on it.” That interest has been refined and converted to an interest in calligraphy. In fact, she often uses the word “calligraphy” to describe the patterns and shapes made by the body in space.

Feelings kicked up thinking about relationships among (student) radicalism, (Freudian) sexual theory, and (new) theatre are tangled. I want to map those feelings—which I think are not peculiar to me. They are tied to a revulsion against the mass media, which—as Kelly Morris puts it—play Sioux to youthful Custers. Identifying “what's new,” journalists draw the innovators out, encourage (even demand) exaggerated claims and premature conclusions, encircle nascent ideas with stolid values, and annihilate experiments by marketing distorted replicas. The “news” is a deadly enemy of what is new, and premature identification may ruin for a lifetime authentic identity.

My first thoughts revealed that I was not very precise or concrete about politics. I turned up some hard prejudices against student radicals. I believed student leaders to be deeper into revolutionary rhetoric than radical action. I dismissed many actions on American campuses as either “escalated panty raids” or “senseless disruption.”

Between 1909 and 1913 the German section of the Theosophical Society held annual conventions in Munich. Part of the festival was the production of plays that were pertinent to spiritual science. It was Rudolf Steiner who gave the impulse for dramatic performances. His four “Mystery Dramas” were written for the Theosophical conventions. He wrote plays only when he knew that they were about to go Into rehearsal in Munich, and each was in production for about two months. In those days there was not yet any special training for the amateur performers in the plays, save in rehearsal periods. Each play was revived each year between 1910 and 1913 so that by 1913 all four plays were performed for the Society's two-week meeting.

—And we?
—I beg your pardon?
—Where do we come in?
—Come in? On our hands and knees.
Samuel Beckett, playwright

According to statistics published in the New York Times and Fortune, more than $3 billion was spent last year on “everything from Bach and the Beatles to Shakespeare, Shaw, the opera … Peter, Paul, and Mary … Monet and Melville.” Consumer spending in the arts jumped 130% between 1953 and 1960—about “twice as fast as spending on all recreation and better than six times as fast as outlays for spectator sports.”

Online musical performances in the first few months of the pandemic and lockdown in New York City bring to light the sonic and temporal challenges, unique acoustic space, and aesthetic possibilities of performing on Zoom. The social connection gained through these performance events is the key to their efficacy.

In the opening scene of Jack Gelber's The Apple an action painter is flicking large globs of pigment at a piece of celluloid, commenting as he works, “No design is a grand design,” and, “Art is precision.” He takes a rolling pin and smears the paint over the celluloid, creating an arresting pastiche of brilliant colors, chaotic patterns, intriguing textures, and—if you look at it in just the right way—some sort of artistic expression. Then Julian Beck enters and asks, “Whose wet dream is that?” This jarring punch-line sets the tone of the Living Theatre's preoccupation with illusion and reality, a theatrical pair of dice that are constantly tumbled about and spilled into the audience. And the audience pays for it: the night I was there, the painting was auctioned off for $6.50.

The original and substantive texts of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (the Quartos of 1604 and 1616) present the play completely without the punctuation of act division or scene enumeration. This is common enough in the play-texts of the period. Indeed it is much the commonest form in plays written for the public theatres. Shakespeare's Henry V and Pericles are without divisions in their quarto texts, but we know that they were written with a five-act structure in mind—the choruses tell us that.

What is exceptional in the textual history of Doctor Faustus is not the lack of division in the original texts; it is rather the reluctance of modern editors to impose an act-structure on the modern texts. This is curious, but it seems possible to discern why the reluctance exists and a survey of the modern editions of Faustus throws some interesting light on critical attitudes to the subject matter of the play.

Acting has been variously defined as impersonating, imitating, interpreting, creating, feeling, radiating, being, behaving, or believing. Acting has even been defined as acting. In his book, The Actor's Ways and Means, Michael Redgrave states:

Established actors, needing no definition, may accept any misty generalization if they are not sure what it is they are doing. The student actor needs a definition to guide him in understanding the process at any specific moment in the performance. The least common denominator in the actor's performance is a single unit. This unit is compounded of a stimulus and a response.

Many Indian traditional theatre performances are connected with different Hindu religious cults and deities and performed by devotees. Drawing upon a common body of religious literature—the Puranas, the Mahabharata, and the Ramayana—these theatres enact the individual episodes especially meaningful to a given deity, cult, and, sometimes, region. Since they are most often performed within a religious context, they require ritual cleanliness and other devotional observances. These, the most overtly religious actions, may occur at the opening or closing or may suffuse the entire performance, in which case the performance itself is a votive offering.

The main rituals connected with Indian traditional theatre begin in the dressing room hours before a performance. Thus, Kathakali actors begin their makeup procedures with a silent prayer for success.

Stanislavski and Freud share many common features, not the least of which is that each is supported by violent partisans, is attacked by violent antagonists, and is the object of unproductive discussion. Whatever the ultimate fate of their doctrines, we shall never go back to our pre-Stanislavskian naivete about acting in the theatre or our pre-Freudian naivete about living in the world. It must be born in mind in the following discussion that each is a great man, and if either is subjected to less than favorable comparisons it should not obscure the fact that each is pre-eminent in his field. The problem will be to estimate in some judicious and productive manner the nature and importance of their contributions in the light of the problems of the theatre.

At the heart of Euripides’ masterpiece, The Bacchae, is a communal sacrifice. The city of Thebes is sacrificed to Dionysus to satisfy his capricious ego. In supporting this thesis I will contest several widely held theories about the play: (1) that Dionysus represents Fate or any of its equivalents; (2) that the god is a life force or some other pantheistic “god of ecstacy in religion”; or (3) that the play gathers its primary force from the encounter between Dionysus and Pentheus.

My reading of The Bacchae is an internal one: I want to see what the play will yield on only its own terms. I realize, of course, that political and social ideas both press in on the play and, if we seek them, emanate from it. These ideas are, I believe, extra-dramatic: they radiate from the script, enriching it and partially explaining its genesis, but they are not present as a dramatic immediacy.

Ermione, the title of my play, was also the name of the monkey who performed with me in it. It was originally the name of a mythical character, the daughter of Helen and Menelaos; more recently, It was used by Gabriele D'Annunzio in his poem “The Rain in the Pine Forest.” In my play, the monkey corresponded to D'Annunzio's “nymph with the sylvan face” who accompanied him through the metaphorical wood of life.

The text of Ermione was comprised of poetry that I had written from the age of sixteen to thirty; the action consisted of experimenting with ideas for a eventual reading of it. The first thing I wanted to test was the actual selection of verses. I read from a notebook, then provided a running commentary in order to create a distance between the time when the poems were written and the time when they were read. By so doing, I was able, at the same time, to minimize this distance by connecting the old poems to a “live” situation, thus making the link between poetry and life explicit. Next, I wanted to test the actions—the theatrical renderings of the poetry that corresponded to the different stages of life.

The Living Theatre's four splendid spectacles were a great event. Like an astonishing portion of the country's popular music, they proved to be in content form outside the social system, not structured by it nor, except as outlet, implementing it: liberated territory. The tribe of disdainers of the money-job-marriage game came to celebrate, greeted the Company with the frivolous cynicism of the stray salesmen present & made a closed party of it, perfuming the air of liberty that they polluted. But the word was Revolution, it was posed in fundamental terms & urgent tones—in the most radical sense possible. Even the attending communists, finding the affair objectively counter-revolutionary, could hardly deny the validity of the ultimate ideal: “eine Assoziation, worin die freie Entwicklung eines jeden die Bedingung für die freie Entwicklung aller ist” (an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all).

Nikolai Foregger (1892-1939), christened Nicholas Baron Foregger von Greiffenturn, the sole descendant of an aristocratic Russo-German family, was one of the most extreme exponents of mechanization and abstraction in the Soviet theatre and dance during its first decade. Foregger belonged to that unique generation of Russian writers, artists, directors, and dance-masters who, born in the 1890's, quickly reached their artistic maturity in the early Twenties. Writers and artists like Mayakovsky, Sergei Tretyakov, Isaac Babel, Varvara Stepanova, and Alexander Rodchenko are among the best known of that era. In the fields of theatre and dance, there were Foregger Eisenstein, Sergei Radlov, Boris Tikhonovich, Boris Ferdinandov, the FEKS group Vera Maya, and Kasyan Goleizovsky. Together, despite acknowledged differences in motivation and style, these young artists accepted the critical appellative Constructivist to describe their art.

With the exception of Eisenstein (see T61) and Meyerhold, who was judged according to other standards, the scenic work of the Constructivists is not well known although at the time of the Constructivist period (1920-1924), many of their productions and techniques were considered more radical than Meyerhold's and in fact prefigured many of his own post-revolutionary innovations, such as Biomechanics and mobile decor.